Posts Tagged ‘psilocybin’

It is argued that altered states, which can result from a range of cause including near-death-experience (NDE), meditation or psychedelic drugs, can be directly causal of durable personality changes. Further to this, recent experimentation suggests that some altered states can deactivate brain regions responsible both for the sense of self, and for constraining ‘mystical’ type experiences in other brain regions. Thus contrary to any suggestion that the self is some type of ‘mystical illusion’ it may in fact be part of a system that constrains ‘mystical’ experience during normal brain processing.

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Magic mushrooms create a hyperconnected brain Tia Ghose, based on Paul Expert, King’s College London www.livescience.com rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org royalsocietypublishing.org/journals Summary and review of the above article A study at King’s College London, published in the Journal of the Royal Society on October 28 2014, has shown that psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, disrupts normal connections within the brain, while allowing connection Read more […]

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Into the minds of babes :: Anil Ananthaswamy, based on Stanislas Dehaene, Sid Kouider & Robin Carhart-Harris :: New Scientist, 23 August 2014 Summary and review of the above article Stanislas Dehaene indicates that conscious perception arises through a two stage process. The first stage involves the unconscious processing of an image, and then after about 300 ms a network of brain regions, particularly in the frontal and parietal areas, supports the perception of a conscious image, which Read more […]

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Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1119598109 This paper further undermines the persistent claim within mainstream consciousness studies that all that needs to be done is to deconstruct the self (a relatively easy process) and then declare the consciousness problem solved. Altered states of consciousness have always appeared to contradict this claim, but the evidence of this was at a rather anecdotal level. Read more […]